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Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Horrors of Spider Island (screens April 5 at Cinema Wasteland)

All this fuss about the 50th anniversary about
the Beatles’ tour of the USA
and the British Invasion; yet not much at all back in 2009 about the 50th
anniversary of HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND. At least one aspect of the Obama
Administration had priorities straight

HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND is a 1959 badfilm obscurity that
I mainly knew from an evocative old Famous Monsters of Filmland cover. Forrest J Ackerman made
it look far better than it ever could be. In some parts of the world it was
called HOT IN PARADISE, or, variously, IT’S HOT IN PARADISE or A CORPSE HANGS
IN THE WEB, but in a more descriptive moniker is became HORRORS OF SPIDER
ISLAND.

I downloaded HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND in all its MPEG
glory. Wow, I am speechless. Sort of a West German-Yugoslavia badly-dubbed
horror take on what would be a 1959 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Plot has
eight dancers/strippers and one male manager en route to a Singapore
showbiz gig surviving a plane crash and getting marooned on a lonely
Pacific island.

Just from seeing a hammer lying around, the guy boss
deduces that there’s a uranium deposit on the island. The girls ask if uranium
is edible. I think I would have liked to have been around in those day. It
would’ve increased my chances of landing a decent job. Today such women would summarily get hired over
me in Cleveland.

Possibly because of the uranium, the island has a
population of mutant foot-long puppet spiders, who look kind of the Zanti
Misfits from the old Outer Limits show. On one hot night when the girls are all
stripping their clothes off to sleep, the lone man is unlucky enough to be
bitten by one (spider, I mean).

He mutates into a furry-faced fiend with clawlike hands
and only three fangs. From time to time he stalks and kills remaining humans on
the island. But he’s not really all that much on the characters' minds, as a few sailors
come ashore as well and have time to flirt with the girls and hold a bikini
dance party before the denouement, involving quicksand.

Let’s see… Radioactive spider-bite produces human mutation,
sort of like a “spider-man,” hmm… I know Cleveland
filmmakers who, merely based on that, would definitely file lawsuits against
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and Sony/Columbia and Brian Michael Bendis, demanding
archipelagoes of cash for ripping them off on this junk. But SPIDER
ISLAND director Fritz Bottger,
using the pseudonym Jaime Nolan (never trust showbiz folk who change their
names) never did so, to my knowledge. Really though, it’s a horrible horror
effort that I heard got a deserved Mystery Science Theater treatment.

Well, at least the Eastern-European actress are pretty in
the non-anorexic1950s voluptuous tradition, and I do hope most of them dropped out of
acting to pursue more decent and honorable careers, like going to work for the
KGB or the Stasi or something to be Cold War honey traps.

Blonde, Valkyresque Barbara Valentin, in her first major
role here, rose to some fame as Austria’s
answer to Marilyn Monroe. Fraulein Valentin later appeared regularly in the
cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She was also a lover of rock superstar
Freddy Mercury, who raved about the quality of her breasts (and this guy was
gay, from what I understand; those must’ve been some breasts).

But, I understand, Valentin got banned from attending his
funeral. Maybe before the ceremony Brian May found a VHS of HORRORS OF SPIDER
ISLAND and alerted security. See girls, those early movie roles you did for
money WILL come back to haunt you. Or Barbara Valentin is now universally
disliked by musicians; Yoko Ono can’t get all the haters.(1 out of 4 stars)